Wednesday, September 14, 2011

What does it mean to read a text? How do the perspectives we bring to reading shape and limit our understanding? This course will focus on one primary text and a wide range of theoretical materials; through intensive study and discussion, students will develop the tools necessary for graduate study in English, and will leave the course with a better sense of the critical and methodological frameworks they might bring to their future work in the discipline.

All student staff edits Oyez Review, a literary journal featuring fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, published at Roosevelt for 35 years. Hands-on internship in editing, designing, producing, publicizing, and distributing the journal. Some instruction in protocols for book, magazine, and newsletter publishing.

Monday, March 8, 2010

What does it mean to read a text? How do the perspectives we bring to reading shape and limit our understanding? This course will focus on one primary text and a wide range of theoretical materials; through intensive study and discussion, students will develop the tools necessary for graduate study in English, and will leave the course with a better sense of the critical and methodological frameworks they might bring to their future work in the discipline.

While these three writers are rightly considered lions of American modernism, their reputations were made long before we began focusing on such concerns as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation as part of literary analysis. Yet even in this changed critical climate, the authors hold their own, for each has an unique take on marginalization, expressed in a distinctive voice and a compelling style. In all three cases, we'll look at works considered major as well as some deemed minor because in the "smaller" works we often find earlier versions of ideas expressed in the novels. Are these variants alternates, refinements, mutations, or something quite different? Readings will include Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, "Barn Burning," and "That Evening Sun;" Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise as well as a number of short stories; and Stein's Three Lives, selected poems, and some excerpts from longer works including The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Students compose and revise their own poetry while studying the foundations of poetry, including classical metrical poetry, and today's more eclectic free verse.

Nonfiction II/III (Staff T.B.A.)

Description forthcoming.

Reading & Writing Eco-Literature (Kimberly Ruffin)

What is America's history and present of ecological writing? This multicultural study of U.S. eco-literary traditions and trends includes both canonical and emerging authors. The range of topics includes various perspectives on: "going green," global climate change, nature-writing, and environmental justice. Students read and apply ecocritical theory and author their own literature. Works from most, if not all, of the following authors will be required reading: Henry David Thoreau, Alice Walker, Enrique Salmon, Rachel Carson, Joseph Bruchac, Patti Ann Rogers, Leslie Marmon Silko, David Mas Masamoto, Mary Oliver, Aldo Leopold, Cesar Chavez, and Janisse Ray. Note: this course involves experiential learning that requires off-campus activities, including participation in Roosevelt University's New Deal Service Day.

All student staff edits Oyez Review, a literary journal featuring fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, published at Roosevelt for 35 years. Hands-on internship in editing, designing, producing, publicizing, and distributing the journal. Some instruction in protocols for book, magazine, and newsletter publishing.

Feminist Theories of Performance will explore how gender is performed in both the theater and life. We will bring a variety of critical perspectives to bear on our examinations of plays, novels, films, and performance art, including feminist theater theory, feminist literary theory, feminist cultural theory and the feminist philosophy of Judith Butler. By the end of the term, students will be able to apply feminist criticism from all these perspectives to their own written analyses of works in all four genres (drama, film, fiction, and performance art).

An exploration--through close analysis of screenplays and practical writing exercises--of fundamental screenwriting principles, with an emphasis on feature films. The course will be taught partly as a seminar and partly as a workshop. By the end of the course, students will have written, workshopped, and revised a short screenplay and produced a number of weekly précis on various aspects of screenwriting craft. There will also be some discussion of practical steps leading to screenplay production.

The recent explosion in food writing has created the theme of this Advanced Topics in Literary Genre course. We will explore the role of food through several different genres, including: autobiographies and memoirs, sociological and anthropological, cultural and political, restaurant reviews and critiques, cookbooks and recipes, film, blogs, and theory. Students will read texts from a variety of disciplines, write several short essays, conduct ethnographic research and food reviews, and produce a final research project.

Composition Theory--Online (Carrie Brecke)

Cultural, cognitive, and political theories about the acquisition and practice of advanced literacy skills. The roles that reading, direct grammar instruction, rhetoric, and revision play in various approaches to the teaching of writing. *This course is required for Roosevelt's Graduate Certificate in the Teaching of Writing.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

By seriously examining and editing stories written by others (i.e. measuring and helping advance the success of stories according to their authors' intentions), writers not only develop a greater capacity to strengthen their own work, but a clearer understanding of their own literary values. We will read stories by a variety of published authors--like George Saunders and Donald Barthelme--and reverse-engineer them to determine the ways in which they function.

This workshop will examine various forms of creative nonfiction: personal essay, memoir, portrait, literary journalism, lyric essay, and cultural criticism. We will take the self as the point of departure and move out into the world from there, looking at how the personal and public intersect and cultivating our idiosyncratic interests/perspectives. In addition to the focus on student work, the course will include generative writings and discussion of selected readings. Student work and the readings together will provide the opportunity to discuss the aesthetics of nonfiction. Readings from a course packet, with pieces by writers as diverse as Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Touré, Richard Rodriquez, and Anne Fadiman. As the course evolves, additional readings may be added

Film History (L. Howe)

The history of cinema is only about a century long, but in that period the art form has demonstrated remarkable development from silent to sound film, from black and white to color, and from fairly practical staging and framing to vibrant special effects. As film technology developed, filmmakers found new ways to tell stories. We'll note that as film developed new techniques, it created its own history that often commented upon or reflected the social history of the cultures in which it emerged. In our study of the films of Griffith, Micheaux, Lang, Chaplin, Keaton, Welles, Hitchcock, Goddard, Altman, among others, we'll note that, as filmmakers connect with their cultures, they simultaneously develop and exploit a self-reflexive fascination with film's own presence. We'll gauge these dynamics as we consider how film both reflects and influences the ideas and identities of its audiences.

This course analyzes the filmed versions of Shakespear's plays as texts in their own right. We will be viewing films based on specific plays in pairs, moving from a film "faithful" in various ways to the text as written, to one that exhibits a greater degree of adaptation. We will consider Franco Zeffirelli's and Baz Luhrmann's versions of Romeo and Juliet; Roman Rolanski's Macbeth and Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA; Laurence Oliver and Richard Loncraine's takes on Richard IIII; Zeffirelli's Taming of the Shrew and Gil Junger's Ten Things I Hate About You; Branagh's Hamlet and Michael Aylmereda's Hamlet 2000; Oliver Parker's Othello and Tim Blake Nelson's O.

This course begins with one of the best known and most widely influential stage portrayals of witchcraft in theater history, Macbeth, which uses the figure of the witch to explode ideological assumptions about class (patriarchy, class-based social stratification, upward mobility) and gender (social, political, and domestic roles). In this course, we will examine both fantastic portrayals of the witch, including Shakespeare's Macbeth, John Martson's Sophonisba, and Thomas Middleton's The Witch in conjunction with "realistic" portrayals of witchcraft in British and Scottish court depositions as well as the stage representations of those cases in Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton and Heywood and Brome's The Witches of Lancashire. We will consider witchcraft's dual valence in early modern England as both a means of vilifying women and as a means by which women could exercise autonomy and empowerment.

20th Century American Women's Fiction: Gender and Mobility (Ann Brigham)

In many ways, the American experience has been defined by the promise of mobility, that is, the freedom to go anywhere and become anyone. In fact, the two have often been linkedL spacial mobility--the movement between places or across space--has often been understood as a way to achieve a range or other mobilities, from the psychological and sexual to the social and economic. In this course, we will study a range of novels that address a series of related questions: What does mobility mean, and what does gender have to do with it? How can stories of mobility tell us something about the ways gendered and sexed identities, meanings, and performances are negotiated, navigated, and transformed? How can we think of gender and sexuality as modes of mobility? In what ways has mobility been central to definitions of an American identity and experience, and why is that interesting? Focusing on the various ways mobility has been defined, we will examine representations of mobility that include: immigration and assimilation; escape; spatial, social, and sexual border crossings; time travel; racial and gender passing; western expansion and national conquest; the road trip; transnational migration; gender bending and fluidity; bodily mutability; exile and displacement.

MFA graduate course about narratives of place. We'll read and discuss novels, stories, and nonfiction which delve into the complex relationship between human consciousness and the outer world. We'll examine how writers form meaning from experience, how language shapes that experience into compelling and original narratives, and how place is digested and then recast as landscapes of the mind. Students write short weekly papers, creative exercises, and complete a research portfolio to be used toward a place-based narrative writing project. The texts include: The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, River of Earth by James Still, The Stone Diaries by Carole Shields, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: Stories by Z.Z. Packer, Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, The Lost City of Z by David Grann.

Reading & Writing Ecoliterature (Kim Ruffin)

What is America's history and present of ecological writing? This multicultural study of U.S. eco-literary traditions and trends includes both canonical and emerging authors. The range of topics includes various perspectives on: "going green," global climate change, nature-writing, and environmental justice. Students read and apply ecocritical theory and author their own literature. Works from most, if not all, of the following authors will be required reading: Henry David Thoreau, Alice Walker, Enrique Salmon, Rachel Carson, Joseph Bruchac, Patti Ann Rogers, Leslie Marmon Silko, David Mas Masamoto, Mary Oliver, Aldo Leopold, Cesar Chavez, and Janisse Ray. Note: this course involves experiential learning that requires off-campus activities, including participation in Roosevelt University's New Deal Service Day.

Common Knowledge & Cultural Capital (Priscilla Perkins)

Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, Masterpiece Theater, telenovelas, Gertrude Stein, Wikipedia, NASCAR, Hayao Miyazaki, Fox News, 50 Cent, T.S. Eliot, American Idol... Why do academic institutions value certain cultural references and knowledge-sharing strategies more than other? How does practice with academic ways of knowing (like "essayistic" thinking or evidence-based argumentation) allow students to share what they know in socially powerful ways--or simply reproduce the structures of "cultural capital" that exclude certain groups in the first place? Readings in sociology, composition theory, ethnography, and philosophy will help course participants explore how students' access to privileged cultural allusions--their supply of "cultural capital"--contributes to the social and economic outcomes associated with higher educations. *This course counts toward the Graduate Certificate in the Teaching of Writing.

In the past few years the boundaries of these genres, like the boundaries between popular and literary fiction, have grown increasingly fluid. This class will focus on the current state of fantastic fiction during the last two decades, focusing largely on short fiction and touching upon such writers as Robert Charles Wilson, Guy Gavriel Kay, Greg Bear, William Gibson, Connie Willis, Kelly Link, and Ted Chiang. Following introductory historical lectures, the course will develop through detailed discussions of specific stories and novels.

Explores techniques of nonfiction storytelling with an emphasis on personal narrative, such as memoir. Texts include Judith Kitchen's Short Takes and Julie Hilden's The Bad Daughter. Guest workshoppers include Miles Harvey.

Students produce a screenplay in a workshop atmosphere, practicing techniques used by professional screenwriters to create complex characters, thrilling action, and original plots. Some attention to marketing the screenplay, including the treatment and pitch. Robert McKee's Story will be used as a guide, and Yaphet Smith will stop by in March to workshop.